Inpatient medicine is unique. Unlike the singular relationship between patient and provider in the office, hospitalized patients are often cared for by a team of doctors and APPs, sometimes changing on a daily basis. How are these providers to relay information to each other? With each day there is another chapter of a patient’s [...]
Healthcare may be one of the very few industries in which you don’t immediately get paid for the work or service provided. Rather, it can be days, weeks, or even months before payment is actually received for work completed. And that’s if rounding physicians remember to submit the charges. Missed charges mean lost revenue and [...]
With all the changes in healthcare, imagine what these disruptions do to physicians and ultimately the care they provide to patients. Most medical students dream of healing the sick and providing preventative care and recommendations to improve patient outcomes. When reality hits and providing care is lost in a massive sea of clerical work, an [...]
Early in my clinical applications career, we were wading through Meaningful Use Stage 2. It was painful for all concerned. Perhaps one of the biggest associated challenges we had to work through was pop-up fatigue. This culminated when we rolled out an important part of meeting MU2 – a Clinical Decision Support tool. The CDS [...]
Focus on your PEOPLE Your number one priority if you are sitting in the C-Suite is taking care of your PEOPLE. Wait. What? You may be thinking, “Shouldn’t patients always come first? “I disagree. What many top leaders mistakenly do is alienate themselves from their people. And, in front of the line is the medical [...]
According to Definitive Health’s 2019 Annual Healthcare Trends Survey: 38% of Hospital Executives reported reducing operating expenses was their number one priority for 2019. The challenge is….how do we effectively reduce costs while at the same time, not compromise patient care? I believe the answer is getting smarter at HOW and WHERE we provide great [...]
Patients are getting lost between the in-patient and out-patient world. This results in higher readmissions, sicker patients, and skyrocketing healthcare costs. Today, on average, the national rate for 30-day all-cause readmission is almost 15% (see Figure 1 below). Source: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Center for Delivery, Organization, and Markets, Healthcare Cost [...]
How Understanding the Four Stages of Competence Can Improve the Way You Learn and Teach In 2004, I started the University of Arizona’s Paramedic program. It was an intense program by any standard – sixty-four credit hours and hundreds of clinical hours in the space of nine months. Despite a history of being of good student for whom academics came easily – or maybe [...]
Healthcare has advanced in leaps and bounds over the past two decades. From imaging to robotics to novel pharmaceuticals to medical devices - we have seen innovation pave the way for the potential of better patient care. Yet with all of this forward thinking, the mechanics of practicing medicine have remained fragmented and inefficient. What [...]
For years, clinic practices, hospitals, surgery centers, urgent care, assisted living, nursing homes, etc., have operated in silos. You’re probably thinking, “Tell me something I don’t know!” Here we are in the era of technology, where there is an app for everything, and we still cannot track patients as they flow throughout our community healthcare [...]
